Before getting into an overview of the 2017-19 budget deal, let’s recap the moment yesterday when relationships in Olympia went from Cold War to full out nuclear. There are many working parts of the 2017-19 budget deal: the spending policies, K-12 policy changes, tax increases and tax cuts. Included in these details are things that all lawmakers liked and hated but they combined to make the budget deal that avoided a government shutdown. When it came time to sign these various measures into law, however, the Governor decided to veto just one: the B&O tax cut.

Among the reasons the Governor said he vetoed the B&O tax cut portion of the budget deal was due to the lack of transparency and time for public comment. This is a very legitimate concern but it also applies to all other parts of the budget deal (spending plan, McCleary plan, McCleary tax & new sales taxes). If a veto was to be issued for this reason, it should have applied to all parts of the deal – not just the B&O tax cut. This is why we believed the legislature should have adopted a temporary budget after the deal was reached to provide lawmakers, the press and the public adequate time to review the details and comment before it became law.

While the repercussions of this veto continue to reverberate, let’s take a moment to look at a high level overview of the budget deal.

First the budget spends at twice the rate of the current revenue growth. In fact, combined with the 2015-17 budget, the 2017-19 budget will have increased spending by 29% (nearly $10 billion) since 2013-15. Then there are more than $2 billion in tax increases, more than $300 million in fund transfers from dedicated accounts, and a very curious decision to use more than $1 billion in savings to make the state’s pension payments.

Concerning that pension funding decision, the State Treasurer’s Office provided this comment:

Using one-time revenue for an annually recurring expense is concerning. In the coming days there might still be ‘back of the budget’ explanations that will help put this transfer in better context.

Among those expressing concern about the use of dedicated accounts for other purposes was the State Auditor’s Office. Here is their comment concerning the continue raids of the I-900 performance audit funds:

We appreciate that the Legislature sees the value in performance auditing, but remain concerned with the extensive transfers for items that aren’t related to the fund’s intended purpose.

The fine print matters, and I don’t think any of us knows what is truly in this, and I am just deeply unsettled . . . The implications for 7 million people are too serious and too profound to pretend that this is just the normal operation of government. It is not. This is outside the bounds of acceptability, and I think we owe the people of this state an apology.

The process of waiting to the last minute to craft a compromise and the inexcusable lack of transparency in the final days of the session is something both Republicans and Democrats should agree flatly stinks.

“This year’s budget process has been a nightmare. With the threat of a government shutdown mere hours away, we produced and passed an operating budget without any public input. Not to mention, most legislators, myself included, were given only a few hours to review the budget – a document that is 620 pages long. This is unacceptable, especially when we are implementing monumental K-12 education reform that will have an impact for generations to come.”

We’ll have more to say on the various components of the budget deal in the coming weeks. In the meantime let’s hope we don’t experience too much more of this as more is learned about the implications of the 2017-19 budget deal and veto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE

Jason Mercier is the Director of the Center for Government Reform at Washington Policy Center and is based in the Tri-Cities. He serves on the boards of the Washington Coalition for Open Government and CandidateVerification, and was an advisor to the 2002 Washington State Tax Structure Committee. Jason is an ex-officio for the Tri-City Regional Chamber of Commerce.